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Twelve Maleficers in graduating year is a number steadily creeping up to concerning the longer it holds, and it’s been holding for months.
Not that anyone but El seems to know the precise number. The scent of rotting corpses is almost permanently stuck to her tongue, lingering in the cafeteria and select seminar rooms. Five of them are decently obvious, another three have still got the glamour going strong, one of the oldest ones is already caving in on themselves, and the last ones took the plunge presumably after realizing how screwed there are for graduation.
El’s year isn’t a big class to begin with. Even with the usual deaths from mals and schoolwork, supporting twelve maleficers has been steadily whittling down them down. The newbies have been cutting out large swaths, going on massacres to make up for lost time.
The sentiment of a month ago was that eventually they’d start killing each other off, if only to preserve their student supply. They haven’t yet, and all the low hanging fruit has disappeared and the enclavers are getting nervous.
The big enclaves like New York and Shanghai are having closed-door talks, and all the smaller enclaves are trying and failing to cram themselves in. It’s being kept tight knit to avoid letting the maleficers know the plan.
A nice sentiment but a complete and utter waste of effort since one of the people in the talks is Thomas Haynes, an American who decided to dip his toes into malia last year and has since done a cannonball into the deep end.
El could point him and all the others out easy, but that’s how you get twelve maleficers with nothing left to hide out for your head.
She’s only kept herself alive this long by ducking her head and painfully sucking up to the few connections she does have. Drawing a target on her back would undo all that loathsome work. She’ll wait for them to stop ignoring her and, until then, keep her mouth shut.
With her status as next week’s dinner, El doesn’t expect it to take long.
She isn’t surprised when one morning while she’s cramming in a last bit of mana-building before breakfast, a malicious spell drapes itself around her. Reaching out with the particular bite of malia that she can almost taste in the instant before she snaps it back at the perpetrator.
The distraction, while concerning, only causes her to suffer an interruption in the flow of mana to her crystals. El happily throws her crochet onto her desk, and valiantly ignores the urge to set it on fire.
If she’s lucky, at breakfast people will be talking about Thomas’s gruesome death from being turned into a mummy or something, and then the enclaves can make some real progress before someone comes at her with a knife or poison instead of a spell.
She’s grabbing her bag when the screaming starts.
The sheer volume suggests a deadly mal is waiting out El’s door to really top off the horrible morning. It goes on and on, but utterly lacks the characteristic bloody gurgle that precedes dying. It’s either a lure or someone gave in to the breakdown everyone in the school has brewing, which they’re all trying really, really hard not to think about.
This is why El gives herself 15-minute cry sessions.
If El doesn’t leave now, breakfast will flip over to the juniors before she gets through the line. She can’t afford to miss the calories and go through a day lightheaded when someone may still be gunning for her. If there is a deadly mal out there, she’ll just have to deal.
She opens her door cautiously, hiding behind the metal in case something tries to lunge at her. Nothing does.
The screamer is huddled in his doorway across the hall and six rooms down. Between him and El is a pair of corpses, eyes burnt out of their head. The black rings around their empty sockets almost look like makeup, but the smell disabuses her of that notion quickly.
The Scholomance trains you to get used to death, but not so much corpses. Mals grab them before you could see any of the really gruesome details.
A couple students die in busy areas from failed alchemy or shop projects, or the slow painful death you get from escaping a mal with your life but without most of your blood or limbs. Those places don’t stay busy for long. Students can smell the blood in the water just as well as mals and the person gets snapped up after everyone else hastily vacates the area.
Given all that, El can understand being queasy, maybe letting out a shout of surprise at the discovery. Prolonged screaming is a bit excessive though.
Or maybe it’s the future evil sorceress in her that has her heading for the stairs instead of the nearest drain. The screamer curls into a ball as she passes, ripe to be eaten. Her stomach is hardened by a childhood longing to dissect whatever small animal she could get her hands on.
In this case, the pair may have been the ones casting the spell she reflected. Two baby maleficers who tried jumping on the bandwagon with the wrong target.
This reassuring belief carries her right to the base of the staircase where there are three more bodies splayed before the steps and a significantly larger amount of blood. Their eye sockets hollow and bloody instead of burned, like they had burst inside their heads.
Thomas is one, how nice of him not to make her wait for breakfast, and the other two are also known maleficers. The malia shine on Thomas and the girl is working overtime to make the blood splatters look like an artful fashion choice rather than remnants of a gory demise. It only succeeds in making them more gruesome to look at.
The third corpse is a more normal looking dead body, with black staining the tips of his fingers and the start of fangs in his slack mouth. One of the smart maleficers; the shine never really stuck to those ones. He could have made a living doing dirty work for enclaves if he’d kept that smart streak. Instead, he’d teamed up with these two and died for it.
The two dead in the hall must have gotten caught by whatever spell they were trying before it reached El.
If she’d skipped crochet to go to breakfast earlier or headed off to the washroom, she might have snapped the spell back before it reached them.
She also might have been dead since there would’ve been no one willing to go to the washroom with her or watch her back as one of the first people in the stairs.
El squishes the little seed of guilt ruthlessly. They’re dead, she isn’t, her focus needs to be on not joining them.
The magnitude of the spell doesn’t become evident until the line for breakfast runs through and there are still piles of, mostly spoiled, food waiting in the serving dishes. As the last person leaves the line, all the seniors take a good long look around and suddenly notice exactly how empty the cafeteria is.
El is not excluded from this, despite having made a pass when she got in. Her worry had been on snagging a seat at a decent table when there were so few people around, not the number of people itself. She’d barely managed to buy herself a spot with a recently allied group by offering to grab two jugs of water for the table all alone. The task had been surprisingly easy since most of the selection was still available, which, in hindsight, was another clue something is wrong.
In the line there’d been talk of the corpses in the halls, more than just the two El herself had seen but she hadn’t been paying attention to the exact counts that were being passed around.
Now, the buzz of gossip dies off, the creaking vents audible as all the seniors finish looking around. The good tables are all full, but partially with juniors who have crept closer than usual, filling in spots that a day ago had been snatched up by new graduation alliances.
It’s not unusual to see a few juniors around, especially with the maleficers whittling the seniors down, but not this many. To that point- El scans the tables again. The other nine maleficers are also absent from the cafeteria.
The silence spreads through the juniors waiting for the buffet to flip over, and back through the sophomores and freshmen. Something big happened. Something big enough to take out half the seniors, and no one can say what did it.
The stillness breaks as one boy on the edge of the seniors picks up his tray and bolts back to the buffet. The buffet that is still half-full of food.
El grabs her own mostly empty tray and books it towards the leftovers. The cafeteria morphs into a swarm of elbows and knees, people shoving and stumbling and kicking their way towards the extra calories.
Someone dumps a slick on the ground and wipes out a whole swath of seniors like dominoes. The remaining food on their trays flying out and trampled underfoot. El takes a knee to her hip and plows through the pain, hands a vice grip on her tray.
She is in the first half of people to makes it back to the buffet, carried by her table being near the food. For her efforts, she snags two extra buns, a spoonful from the only curry pot that doesn’t have the tell-tale signs of the peppers being switched for lava, and the last scraggly bits of noodles.
Combined with her earlier pass, it is the largest meal she’s had since coming to the Scholomance.
When the tables resettle, everyone has at least a bit more food on their plate and they guard it viciously. The conversations of the lower years start up again, including the customary shrieks from the juniors at the food line as nasty surprises unveil themselves, but save for a few graduations alliances and enclaves huddled tight together whispering, the seniors remain silent.
All of them, including El, chew their food and try to figure out what this means.
El has a good idea for herself. More food, sure, but her already small seminars are going to shrink to nothing, there will be less people in shop to take the mals’ attention, less doors to bang on in the night. El rips up a bun and stuffs it into her mouth as she skims the room again. Many others are doing the same.
She only spots one of the girls she tags along with for the washroom. Two people of the ten she’s found who only mostly rip her off in spell trading are here, and neither of them nice.
Graduation alliances will fracture. With the random array of dead people most alliances must be missing at least one or two. Good for El, who currently sits in the uncomfortable position of loser who hasn’t been asked and can’t beg her way on, but not actually good past that.
There is probably only 200 hundred people, give or take a few dozen, left in the year. Less people to take spots on enclaver’s teams, but also less enclavers, less people to act as the team between you and the hoard of mals that will descend as soon as the school drops them into the graduation hall.
Even though they have survived whatever this is, the odds of getting out of graduation have dropped lethally. If El has to guess, no more than the two best alliances will make it out this year. If she doesn’t get in an enclaver’s alliance and get access to a power sharer she’ll be one of the many dead devoured by the mals.
Her mum must be freaking out right now. Mum gets hints sometimes, gut feelings, and after the spell killed half the year, she would have got a big one. She knew El wasn’t coming home before El did.
El refuses to let her mother mourn her alongside her father.
Now is a very good time for her to pull out a great working of magic so an enclaver will recruit her. But does she do the smart thing that will salvage her future demise? No. Instead, she sits on the bench, dazed as all the other seniors, and it’s only by luck that she hears one of the girls at the other end of the table whispering.
“What’s going to happen to their stuff?”
Their stuff. El’s chewing slows to a halt. The artifacts, mana crystals, tools, clothes, and charms of 200 people who have spent the year facing down the death sentence of the graduation hall. If you could get into a dead enclaver’s room or even hit a couple good artificers and alchemists, well, even though an incanter’s personal spell books will have meandered off into the void by now, their mana crystals will stick around.
El starts chewing again. One of the other people at the table has shushed the girl and is looking around carefully. Everyone else picks up the pace of their eating and El finds herself joining them.
Like the first kid who had made the run to the buffet, the first seniors who start breaking down doors will get their pick of the stuff. If they aren’t eaten by the mals that have slunk in to snack on the bodies, or horribly maimed by traps the more paranoid students may have left.
El seeks out one face in the crowd, and for the first time is relieved to see it. Marcos is a trader but not one of the two left alive that trade mostly fair with her. She stopped trading with him in second year because he ripped her off more than every other person she traded with. He didn’t do it because he was mean, he did it because he was desperate, like her, which she can respect even if she won’t trade with him again.
He must be even more desperate now, and he’s artificer track.
She shoves the last of her food into her mouth and heads for his table.
Marcos is second from the end and she can’t whisper without catches the suspicion of everyone else at the table. Instead, she marches up and lies. “Want to make a shop run while the mals are distracted in the dorm halls? You can keep half of whatever I get.”
This is, objectively, a horrible idea for anyone who isn’t certain of their otherwise imminent demise. The mals will be far more active with all the corpses around. Their attention being focused away from the shop isn’t a guarantee of emptiness. Fortunately, like her, Marcos is just enough of a loser that he needs every edge those extra supplies will get him in trading, and she is bad off enough to offer him a blatantly unbalanced trade.
He looks up at her crossed arms and blank face, and after a moment gives her a narrow-eyed nod.
“Alright, but you take point on the stairs.”
El scowls. That is a fantastically horrible deal, but he knows if she’s reaching out again, she must be desperate enough to agree to anything. Everyone else at the table knows it too, she just has to sell it.
She grits her teeth. “Fine.”
Marcos polishes off the last of his food and they dock their trays together. When they exit the cafeteria, he waits for her to turn onto the stairs before following and they cautiously climb down back-to-back. El focuses really hard on how she’s going to the shop to get supplies, in an attempt to move the trouble where they aren’t going, right up until they hit the shop landing and she keeps going.
“You passed the shop!” Marcos hisses at her.
“I know, we’re not going to the shop.” El says, not daring to look at him instead of the stairwell. “If I announced to everyone in the cafeteria that we were going to go raid dead students’ dorm rooms we wouldn’t get to grab any of the good stuff.”
Marcos grabs her arm, forcing them to a stop in the middle of the stairs which is a horribly vulnerable position. “That’s suicide. The mals will kill us the instant we pick the wrong door.”
El blows out a breath of air and tries to feign nonchalance. His grip doesn’t loosen so she probably isn’t fooling him.
“I have a lot of spells that are very mana intensive, but very good at killing things.” He opens his mouth to say something, probably a denial but she cuts him off. “Don’t believe me that’s fine, I’ll go in first, I just need you to unlock the doors and check for traps once the room is mal-free.”
No one still alive is dumb enough to believe that claim without proof. El doesn’t need him to believe her, though. Marcos is smart. He must have run the odds by now and knows he isn’t going to be in one of the alliances escaping unless he does something drastic, and she’ll be shouldering a good chunk of the risk.
Finally, he lets her arm go. “How are you going to fuel the spells if they’re so mana intensive? One or two rooms isn’t going to be enough.”
“I’ll blow my personal mana if we have to, but I get to use any mana crystals we find until we finish, and then we split the remainder.”
She can see the moment he decides. Choices like these need to be made quick and followed through on quicker. Like a last-minute run to the shop because your lock is destroyed. The longer you wait, the more dangerous it gets.
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
El nods and they start moving again.
The landing into the senior dorms is empty of corpses, but the faint smears of blood on the walls reveal that there certainly had been some this morning. It isn’t the same stairwell El used earlier either. She’s starting to get a picture of what happened to the other nine maleficers.
Four staircases on the floor, three maleficers for each, all waking up bright and early to cast something to kill everyone still sleeping or hiding in their rooms. They could mop up stragglers who got up the stairs early during breakfast and then sail right out of the graduation hall on the residual power from such a large sacrifice.
It is insane. It also would work.
El has a sense for these things and she felt the malicious spell try to sink its teeth into her this morning. Reflecting it had been a reflex. She didn’t realize how lethal it would be, how thin the margin of time was if it killed half the graduating class in the second before it rebounded.
El reaches out to steady herself against the wall as the realization sinks in just how close she had been to death. How close everyone had been. No one else would have been able to snap it back in time. It was just another thing El was able to do instinctively, like make spells to activate super volcanoes, except this time it saved lives in the process of murdering the casters. Which is new.
“Not this one.” Marcos clicks his tongue in annoyance, pulling away from the first door.
“What?” El croaks.
He looks over at the sound of her voice, not out of any sort of concern, she’s sure, but just in case something has snuck up on them and he hadn’t noticed.
“The Scholomance diverts a little bit of its energy to reinforcing the locks on the doors of living students. It’s not much in the face of most mals but it’s something,” he shrugs. “When you die there’s no point to the energy anymore so while the lock’s still there you can tell the room doesn’t belong to anyone anymore.”
That’s the Scholomance. Ever efficient in the face of your gruesome death.
“Easier for the mals to get in, then,” she says.
Marcos nods grimly.
“Still want to try this?”
El steels herself, pushing off the wall. This is her only shot. “I’m already here.”
The next door does belong to a dead person. Marcos fiddles with the mechanism until there’s a faint click, and then backs a healthy distance away, leaving El to be the one to open the door.
She grips her channeling crystal with one hand, casting her mum’s shield as she throws open the door. No sense letting something hide behind it while you slowly open it and peer in getting your head eaten.
Nothing.
Nothing visible at least. Except the corpse still lying under the sheets, sleeping, probably. Not the worst way to go.
El does a quick scan of the place and then beckons Marcos in. He doesn’t find any traps, and nothing jumps out at them, so they set about efficiently stripping the room. Marcos starts ripping apart the shelves for spare parts and El ducks under the bed trying very hard to ignore the corpse just above her and pulls out the trunk.
She grabs the biggest set of spare clothes and the small collection of mana crystals. They are clunky and don’t seem terribly efficient, but are mostly full, and the corpse certainly isn’t going to use them. She doesn’t reach for the channeling crystal still strung around the corpse’s neck. El wraps the crystals in the clothes and sticks the bundle in her bag, then shuffles past Marco. The swap leaves him to sort through the trinkets, tools, charms, and artifacts while she examines the books on the desk for anything good in a silent agreement to divvy up their haul later.
There are glaring holes in the small, leaning shelf of books where the really good ones have already escaped, and the rest are useless or in a language she doesn’t know except for one set of French spells that look vaguely useful.
Marcos doesn’t bother locking the door again after they leave, shutting it solemnly behind him.
“We’ll have to drop stuff off before too long,” he notes.
El’s bag is already half full and that person didn’t have much. If they hit an enclaver’s room, even starting empty they won’t be able to grab everything in one trip.
“Two more, then we break to drop stuff off and get more bags.”
He agrees but there’s a good chance he’ll take the stuff and not come back. One room without a mal is already lucky, he isn’t going to keep testing it longer than he has to.
They repeat the motion with the next door, but this time when El flings it open a fluorescent soul eater is sitting on the other side. It’s halfway to the door when El finishes her incantation for unravelling souls and she’s thus privy to the wonderful sight of the mal dissolving in a screaming ball of light until only an empty, glowing wisp remains.
El shoos it over to Marcos who barely breaks out of his wide-eyed astonishment to take it.
“Shit. Maybe this can work.”
He eyes her while they strip that room-no worries over other mals here, the soul eater would have gotten them along with the corpse-but after unlocking the next door he doesn’t move quite so far away.
When they split to drop off the first batch of stuff, El provides Marcos with one of the scavenged mana crystals to set up a proper ward on his room so their hard work doesn’t get stolen, doing the same when she gets to her own room. She dumps her bag out on her bed and nudges stuff into a semblance of piles. One spell book she’d hid among the rest of the clothes is buried in her trunk instead.
She isn’t giving up a set of major magnetic workings to an artificer. She isn’t even obligated to feel bad because she saw him slip at least two artifacts into his pockets not his bag.
Marcos reappears instead of calling it with his tidy haul. El seals away her shock, and they get back to work.
She tears through a hoard of what look to be flesh-stripping hummingbirds with a carefully controlled blast of mortal flame, reduces a pair of chayenas to a pile of bleached bones, banishes a disembodied wight, disperses a mesmeric whisper, and accidentally kicks a toe-chewer straight into the void.
After each mal, confidence clings tighter to Marcos and El finds it rubs off on her. The spike of fear at the sight of every mal steadying in her successes.
Receiving the leftover parts of El’s latest kill is certainly an incentive for Marcos to stick around through even a dangerous-looking fight. Mal pieces are powerful and hard to come by, and El has a lot of spells designed to get precisely that sort of thing so evil wizards everywhere can be well supplied for their dark machinations.
They mostly hit the rooms of incanters, but they get one top-tier artificer’s room that has Marcos stuttering when he unlocks the door, and raid the potion cabinets of two alchemy-track kids. El snags a nice selection of healing potions, sleep substitutes, and focus enhancers. They agree to pick through the more niche selection with the other things.
As their hoard grows, discomfort begins to pick at the edges of El’s mind. Her mum wouldn’t approve of this. There is a line, and El is dangerously close to it. On the other side comes taking clothes and books, important resources, from other people, taking mana that isn’t hers from the living. But these students aren’t alive anymore, and El’s mum can softly disapprove as much as she likes so long as El gets out to see it.
They pass another group of five after their third drop off. It’s been enough time that soon there will be too many people breaking down doors to do anything but protect their own stashes, so there’s no time to dally and pick a fight over who gets what room.
Both groups cast suspicious glances over the other and stick to opposite sides of the hall.
None of them make it an issue, so it isn’t one. The problem arises when Marcos picks open the lock-much faster than the other group’s own artificer, El notes with some sort of weird pride-shuffling only a bit to the side before El opens the door.
The room is massive, clearly marked as an enclaver’s by the decorations. Artwork hangs on the walls, a collection of plush armchairs dominate one corner, and a jar of snacks sits on a nearby table. The level of comfort is so unbelievably different from what El has ever considered possible inside the Scholomance, that for a good thirty seconds she actually thinks the enclaver decided the height of décor trends was to have a large, scaly rug in the center of the room.
It’s status as a rug is handily stripped away as the lizard skin peels off the floor and fills out into a hulking shape. It goes up and up and up, until the red, flaring spines along its back scrape the ceiling with a hiss as the glowing blue liquid dissolves the metal.
Marcos throws himself backward to where he should have been waiting, drawing the attention of the other group, as three long tongues lash out at El. They hit the shield and stick fast, winding tight around her chest and dragging her towards it. The mouth of the Lizzog unfolds to welcome her.
Now, the rug comparison may seem like a really bad move on her part since it cost her good incanting time, but it has the benefit of sparking to mind that one maleficer whose brain had evidently rotted quite badly by the time they got up and going. They had decided that instead of having a snakeskin rug or something normal, they were going to build their base inside the frozen mouth of a really gigantic Naga. That worked out well for them as a corpse disposal and garden poison supply, right up until another wizard came along and undid the paralysis and the Naga snapped its mouth shut with the maleficer still inside.
A Lizzog is not quite a snake, but with the unhinged jaw its structure is similar enough to freeze it right before El is pulled in reach of its gleaming row of a hundred needle-like teeth.
She carefully extracts herself from the grip of it’s three tongues, wrinkling her nose at the texture of the saliva. She’ll have to pop her shield above a drain just so none of it gets on her clothes.
Looking back towards the door, El discovers Marcos peering through, having not run away and abandoned her at the first sign of real trouble. Aw, he really does have faith in her ability not to die horrifically by screamingly dangerous mals.
The two other people staring next to him, presumably from the other group of looters, are a less welcome addition.
They are much more stunned. Marcos looks to be staying in the doorway because the Lizzog is quite visibly not yet dealt with, but those two seem frozen to the spot. If the Lizzog breaks her paralysis, they won’t be quick enough avoid the other two tongues waiting in the sides of its mouth.
“Would you like a top-of-the-line lizard skin rug?” She asks Marcos, only partially a joking.
The Scholomance had assigned her an essay on the different ways to magically skin a lizard after the Naga reading.
“No,” he says slowly. “But if you could get me the teeth before obliterating it that would be nice.”
Not an unreasonable request so El turns back and gets to work.
It really would be quite stupid, knowing the story of the maleficer who got himself eaten, to reach in and rip out its teeth by hand. El instead reaches into the bountiful stores of mana she now has access to and chants out the twenty-three syllable Old-English spell for ripping out all of someone’s teeth, including the ones still hiding up in the gums, and gets them neatly lined up in rows on the massive desk.
When they settle, she shoos the gawkers out of the door and hopefully out of range before tossing out a quick, and tiny a la morte, banishing the Lizzog from existence. She could have got some more useful parts from it, but the acid spines are really deadly and even evaporating all moisture in its body or immolating it runs the risk of dispersing the solution into the air instead. Convincing the paralyzed Lizzog that it never existed is much simpler.
When she steps out to wave Marcos inside, the group of five is watching her very, very carefully.
“Right,” she says, and one of them flinches back a bit. That is new and entirely unwelcome. “This might take a couple trips, so long as you don’t go grabbing things from in here while we’re gone, we should be all good. You stay on your side, we stay on ours.”
The apparent leader of the group flicks their gaze between her and the open door consideringly.
“If you help us with any mals in the adjacent rooms we’ll give you a third of the mana crystals we find and one book of your choice.” She offers.
El considers it for a moment. Enough extra mana is the one thing that can get her through the graduation hall even without an enclave power-sharer backing her up. She pokes her head back into the room where Marcos is dismantling something by the bed with care indicating it could blow up or maim him if he gets it wrong.
“Are you all good to finish up here while I walk through a few with them?”
Marcos doesn’t look away from his project. He hums, which she takes to be assent, and she closes the door. No sense providing another enterprising group a shot at his back.
“Right, let’s get going.”
She walks through four rooms with them, two of which contain mals, one of them housing both an ooze and an eldritch stain, before Marcos comes to find her with both their bags and a large stack of books. None of the mals are quite as bad as a Lizzog, but the group is looking suitably squirrely so she suspects they won’t be risking many more rooms now that she’s leaving with her fistful of mana and a tidy pamphlet of household spells.
Even with five wizards, one of them would’ve been dangerously injured before they managed to kill the mals. She waves them off, and as they huddle around each other El gives in to the exhausted suspicion that whatever the group will miss out on by quitting early, they’ll make up trading information. She’d thrown around some heavy-duty spells in their presence. Enough that if they don’t try to grab her for an alliance themselves, they’ll sell that knowledge to someone who will make a pass at her. Probably even enclavers.
It’s surprising how much that idea evokes the urge to curl up in her room and avoid people for the next week. This is what she wants. Proof that she’s worth bringing into a good alliance, maybe even being given a power sharer or the big prize of a guaranteed spot.
El carefully shuts that thought away to be examined later. Or never. Whichever works.
They pass more scavenging groups, ranging from four to nine people before making it to Marcos’s room. One girl tries to snatch a bag as they pass, but El glares at her and she hastily retracts the offending hand.
Once they are safely behind Marcos’s door, El throws up an Aegis ward for good measure.
Marcos’s room, like hers, is not one benefitting in width from the end of year room reallocations, so the pile of stuff overflows from his desk to his bed to the floor. They’d agreed for him to keep all the materials and artifacts in his room, and her to keep the clothes, mana crystals, spell books, and potions in hers.
Now they’re finished, they’ll divide everything, starting with his room because he can break into hers if cheated while she is stuck with no recourse if he backs out.
As El shoves her bag and the stack of books against the door to be taken back to her room, Marcos flips open a catch at the bottom of his trunk revealing a collection of artifacts. She dimly recognizes them as the ones he’d hastily shoved into his pockets in the first few rooms.
The artifacts from the enclaver’s room are not among the hidden ones. They are scattered along his desk with the rest.
At some point this morning, Marcos had decided to trade equally and El had shamelessly kept hiding books in her trunk. It doesn’t feel good to be the one tipping the scales of fairness.
Marcos taps his fingers on the first artifact: a set of lenses. He makes his way down the collection.
“These will highlight any psychic- or eldritch-class mals in neon yellow. This lighter will maintain a fire spell if you spark it right as you finish the incantation and keep feeding mana.”
His hand drifts over a polished silver flute a handspan longer than any El has ever seen, with keys so crammed together it’ll be a wonder if the musician’s fingers don’t catch the ones to either side. Etched into the metal are rings of formulas, incanting preparations, and mana enhancers in Italian and a handful of other romantic languages. On the pads of each key a symbol glints with an inlaid orange gemstone. The artificer must have melted down Iositeus stones to get the unbroken lines.
“Chiara spent two years on this.” His voice is flat, but there’s a tremor in his hands. “She started gathering materials for it in her first year, she finished it during the last finals week. The first spell she cast with it blew up a gobbler that was about to drop on my head.
“Each key represents a syllable. You can cast with sign but it’s slower than chanting, and this is faster than both. Even if you don’t have much experience with flutes, you can rearrange the keys and make a run of a single spell as long as there aren’t too many repeat syllables.”
He doesn’t linger on the flute, but the rest of the artifacts don’t come with anecdotes.
El’s bad feeling gets worse. He’s not trading with her like an equal, he’s trading with her like she’s an enclaver. Someone who will always get the better end of a deal and expects to be given the best things without any fuss.
“I know we said a fifty-fifty split,” El interrupts and resignation crawls across Marcos’s face.
He tries to hide it, but she can follow his thought-process easily because it’s the same one she’d be having in his place. Her reneging, taking the seventy-five percent she’d offered him for the shop run, an awful deal he’d have to take because what could he do? She’s shown she can stop him easily, kill him easier, and with how much stuff they collected twenty-five percent isn’t an amount he can reasonably complain about.
El is not an enclaver.
“I don’t have much use for raw materials, I’m fine to let you have them for a standing agreement that if you trade them for spells, I get a copy.” His eyes widen. This is a really bad deal for her, not him. It relies entirely on the trust that he won’t work around the spirit of the deal by trading for other materials or potions or homework assistance, and that even if he does trade for spells, he’ll tell her. El forges on. “I want first look at the spell books but if any of them interest you, you can have them when I’m done. Let me know which ones and I’ll look through them first so you can get them quicker.
“For the artifacts, you’ll know which ones will work for me. Not the flute though, I couldn’t play it to save my life. I want one of the best shield holders but aside from that I can take a cut on artifacts if I keep an equivalent number of mana crystals. How does that sound?”
Marcos recovers from the shock admirably. El isn’t quite sure she’s recovered from the shock, and she’s the one who offered.
“Deal.” He says firmly, then reaches over and picks out a pendant from the common pile. “This is a basic poison detector, it won’t work on any mals but if you wave it over your food before you eat it you can avoid getting sick.”
El takes it from his proffered hand and strings it along the same cord as her channelling crystal. Once she finishes, he starts picking more things out of the other piles for her. The lighter. A shield holder, like she’d asked, and the enclaver’s one to boot; a bundle of thread for mend and make to patch up thinning spots in clothes and pillows; and an assortment of other useful knickknacks for Scholomance life.
She claims two pairs of scissors out of the general pile, one of them should still be good, and a hammer with a claw at the end. Then they migrate over to her room.
El dumps her bags in the corner and the books on the desk and they go about sorting the pile of spare clothing into sizes that fit El, sizes that fit Marcos, and the remainder which they split to trade off. El can, admittedly, use the good will of trading away some clothes for less than they are worth.
She counts out the mana crystals while he picks through the spell books, including the ones she’d dug out from her trunk, piling up the ones he would eventually like to look at on one end of her desk. The stack is quite small, but there aren’t many books to begin with and the only languages they seem to share are English and French. He does end up wanting a look at the magnetic workings.
They split the empty mana crystals evenly, but he lets her take two thirds of the full ones. Insists, actually, because apparently the artifacts she left him are worth that much.
When they move onto potions and the like, she’s able to separate out the more esoteric and specific healing potions but can’t divine what exactly they’re used for like her mum would be able to. The rest, aside from a few she’s had as projects before, are mysteries.
“I can’t identify all of these,” she admits, “how about you?”
Marcos shakes his head. “I do know an alchemy track guy. He’ll want a cut and probably some of the more exotic stuff, but he can at least identify them, and he won’t cheat us.”
An annoying spark of warmth from being part of an ‘us’ sticks in her chest and refuses to be stamped down.
El agrees and they move on but her mind sticks.
It won’t last any longer than sorting the potions out, she doesn’t expect him to suddenly start liking her as a person once her use has dried up, but until then she can’t help but indulge. Even tries to engage him in more casual conversation topics. It’s been a while since she talked with anyone about something as benign as irritation over translations.
When they finish, Marcos packs up his haul and El helps. All too soon she’s pulling open her door and he is stepping through.
“I suppose I’ll see you again when you’ve got in contact with your alchemy guy,” she says, a bit obviously.
Marcos hums. “We can talk about it at lunch, as long as you’re cool with me tagging along to your table.”
She raises her eyebrows. “My table? You’ve always been able to get better ones than will accept me.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s about to change,” he says. El twists her face. She is pointedly not thinking in that direction. She has a sneaking suspicion the game of trying really hard not to think about it is going to fail once the shock fades. “See you then, El.”
“See you,” she offers back, then stands in the doorway way too long.
She remembers herself once he’s vanished around the curve of the hall and steps back inside. She’s getting distracted while surrounded by piles of supplies and actually clean clothes and more mana than she can hope to generate even if she has someone watching her back and doing her work for the rest of the school year.
El picks up the set of clothes she had laid out on her bed when she and Marcos had sorted through them. She brings the shirt to her face and takes a long, deep breath of the clean scent. No rotting to be found.
She shucks her worn, threadbare, and suspiciously stained clothes and pulls on her news ones. All she needs is a good, long shower with some of the washes she’d got and she’ll feel like a whole new person. She picks out a proper chocolate bar that had been liberated from the enclaver’s jar of snack to celebrate with.
This is the best position she has been in since she entered the Scholomance. Since before everything had fallen through and she’d found herself a friendless loser, subjected to the paranoia of never having someone to help you.
El might now, though. Have someone to watch her back.
It had been a pipe dream, she didn’t have much hope of getting into a good graduation alliance, and now, even though she is not thinking about it, the enclaves might be interested in recruiting her.
But she isn’t thinking about that so instead she thinks about Marcos. He’d offered her pick of the artifacts, insisted on her keeping loads of the mana crystals, and she suspects is intent on actually honouring his half of the bargain for keeping all the materials. It might well be the start of an alliance.
Not a confirmation, there is a bit more feeling each other out than one good day, but the alchemy guy he is bringing in could be the name she’d seen written up beside his on the bathroom wall. It isn’t an offer of friendship, but even without an alliance maybe it’s the offer of someone to sit with at lunch. Someone to go on a real supply trip with. Someone she can ask for help on her shop projects and not have to pay more than the help is worth.
200 people died today, El has kind of sort of caused the death of twelve, but she saved the lives of so many more. She saved Marcos’s life, and all the lives of the enclavers and none of their fancy artifacts and shield holders and warm bodies that willingly flung themselves between the enclavers and danger would have saved them from it. That is something she can hold forever, even if they never know, that once, those enclavers all depended on her to live, and she succeeded.
Not intentionally, but she did. If she can keep 200 people alive by accident, she can keep a graduation alliance alive through the hall to the gates. She can do it.
El relishes in the knowledge as she falls back onto her bed with its same, worn sheets. Just like they were this morning, when she had felt death coming for her. But now things are different. Now, she has a chance.
She can live.